Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

She was born under canvas in the cold and bitter dark. Between two sycamore trees. A child of rusted wheels and the stink of mules. The blood not yet washed from the rags her mother lay on. The world was wide and blind and without mercy. Her first sight of it through the torn seam of a tent and her first sound the coinfall clatter on hardpan dirt when the men came to throw their money down and see her mother dance.

The mother moved like something half remembered from a fever. Thin arms, bare feet, sweat and soot. She danced for dollars and dimes and men who’d long ago forgotten whatever it was they were raised by their own mothers to remember. They’d come with breath like rot and their eyes never blinked. Their hands curled like dead spiders. The girl watched it all.

The man she called father was not much of a father at all but a fraudulent peddler of salvation. A whiskey preacher with a ragged coat and a bottle of Doctor Good. A charlatan of low gospel and high chicanery who’d cry out the name of the Lord and pass the hat. In the morning he’d curse the dust and beat the mule till it pissed blood. He kept a pistol in the stove box. The girl ran her fingers over it and knew it was loaded.

They moved like ghosts across the American wasteland, not born to earth or law. In every town the same: names spit like curses. Gypsies. Tramps. Thieves. But every night the men would come around. After dark, with money in hand and malice in their hearts.

South of Mobile they picked up a smirking squit of a boy. Lost and sunburnt, hard with hunger and cadging a ride. Thin thing with calloused hands and a jaw set wrong from a fight he didn’t win. The kind of boy who don’t ask and don’t tell.

Mama said he could ride with them to Memphis. He climbed aboard and never looked back. His boots were cracked open like spoiled fruit. He looked at the girl like she was something he hadn’t believed in till just then. She was sixteen. He was twenty-one.

In the black hours beneath the wagon he taught her things the world would not forgive. She bled and did not weep.

The preacher watched the boy and knew something foul walked with him. He would have killed him if he’d known, would have dragged him behind the mule till there was nothing left but teeth. The boy vanished like all things that were never meant to stay. Left her swollen and staring.

Three months and her belly began to grow round. The girl walked slow and hard, each step a reckoning. There was no justice. Only continuation. Her mother said nothing. The old man passed her a bottle and kept on preaching. The townspeople spat their old venom: tramps. whores. sinners. Nobody wanted to be there and nobody wanted to leave.

She bore the child in a ditch off the road to Helena, under a sky like scorched iron. Her mother laid her hands on her shoulders and told her not to scream. The baby came screaming instead. The baby came slick and screaming and the earth took her blood like all things it’s owed. Pale as ash.

Born to the same wagon, under the same sky.

Her mother wrapped it in rags and said, She will dance too. The girl looked at the infant and said nothing.

The wheel turned. The dust rose. And the men still came, under cover of night, their faces blank and their money folded.